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There are high-variance (passionate) and low-variance (professional) people, and various gradations in between. HV tend to swing (in work performance) between 2 and 10, while LV tend to swing between 5 and 7.

I'm not sure that I'm convinced by this model. Truly great work is often a result of consistent professionalism combined with ridiculous productivity.

Consider jashkenas, for example: Over the last few years, he's written an impressive number of solid, professional libraries and released them as open source. So he was working from a high baseline, and he gave himself lots of chances at success. Sooner or later, he was bound to write something 1 or 2 standard deviations better than his personal average.

I'd say that CoffeeScript is at least a 9, but it's an outlier from a pretty large group of 7s.

I do think that's somewhat true in software, but I think games are more of a mix of art and software, and in art it's much less common to find consistent winners outside of the mediocre category--- Thomas Kinkade makes consistent nice-looking paintings, but Picasso produced a lot of crap amidst his masterpieces. I'm not sure it's possible to take risks on game design and not end up with a reasonable number of duds, even if you're solid and professional on implementation.

It is true that most game-industry positions aren't really for designers, but these days a large number do involve some amount of design, especially if you want the game to be unique in some way. For example, AI programmers are in an odd position of doing "just implementation", but implementing a system that deeply impacts what kind of gameplay and design is possible (in some cases they quite literally write the tools that the designers will use to do things like write NPC behavior).

Is disproof by counter example allowed? Blizzard is one case of a company that has consistently produced masterpiece games in all of their major ip's at least since Diablo, Starcraft I, and Warcraft 3.

Only because they scrap ones that don't work. There's a difference between consistently producing incredible work and consistently releasing incredible work. Curation is a big part of industry success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warcraft_Adventures:_Lord_of_th...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft:_Ghost

OK, great point.

These numbers are relative to a standard where 5.0 is the average for a professional at one's level of experience, 4 is the minimum, and 6 is about the level where people get promoted. If you're consistently 7-9, you're overqualified for what you're doing and should either get a promotion or another job. In this light, I feel comfortable assuming that in normal situations people average no higher than 6.0, although some people vary more than others.

I was high-variance when younger but I learned to become middle-variance over time. It's a necessary aspect of career maturity. So I probably swing between 4 and 8. I can hit 9 but it's not sustainable (although today's 7 was the 9 of two years ago for me) and before I find myself anywhere near 3, I do everything I can to fix the situation (possibly getting another job).

"Truly great work is often a result of consistent professionalism combined with ridiculous productivity."

I totally agree. In my experience, the HV people the grandparent post refers to are capable of lots of "professionalism" but only when they care about their projects. The difference is how productive they are when they have to work on something they aren't passionate about.

Something they aren't passionate about, or something that bores them? There's a difference. Less than 5% of projects inspire passion for me, but there's a wide middle of projects that I don't love but will enjoy moderately and do well.

Like I said, I'm "middle-variance". I swing between 4 (minimal acceptable) and 8 (max. sustainable). I can keep a 6+ going when I'm not passionate about a project but don't mind doing it, especially if I can see it leading to something better in the future.

You're oversimplifying. There is more than just one variable involved in a person's productivity. "Professional" people can be passionate as well, the difference is in how it's expressed.

Also, I'm not at all convinced that passion is the key component in how great games are made. From what I can see the best games seem to come out of a sense of professional dedication to the ultimate product and the customer. Someone who is passionate tends to pick something up and work really hard on it for a while, but release it half-baked and ultimately unfinished. Id software's recent work is an example.

Contrast this with highly professional game organizations like Valve or Blizzard where, yes, there is passion for games, but there's something else too: a highly professional dedication to polish, completion, continuous refinement of game mechanics, etc. The latter simply produces better games.

And, uh, duh that a high level of talent is not enough to launch you into a position of major influence. That should be obvious. Everyone thinks they have talent, and it's expensive to even evaluate those claims. The only practical way to discover the truth of a claim of talent is to gradually expand a person's responsibility as they prove they can handle tasks. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it's gonna be. The good news is that software unlike most industries affords you the chance to do this on your own, like, for example, that guy who did Minecraft, or any number of other successful indie game developers. They could basically write themselves a check into any game design position at a major company if they wanted to.

>Large human organizations tend to judge both at their worst, and to be negative on unknown people for a longer time than any single rational actor would be, which is why "dues paying" periods are so ridiculously long. What this means is that the people who get ahead are people who can sustain a middling performance over a long time without even a whiff of failure, and not the creative, passionate people who take a lot of risks and can hit the high notes but occasionally screw up.

The problem I think is most are based on top-down command and control and managing by fear, not passion.